Tag Archives: Human Rights

“Philosophy and Poverty”, a new fully peer-reviewed book series published by Springer. The first volume is scheduled to be published in 2018. The book series is edited by Henning Hahn, Gottfried Schweiger and Clemens Sedmak, whose work is supported by an international Advisory Board. It is the first book series to focus exclusively on philosophical research on poverty, which is an area of increasing interest and high social and political importance. The book series is not restricted to issues of ethics and justice which dominate the philosophical research on poverty, but is also open to questions related to the philosophy of science, epistemology or history of philosophy insofar as they relate to poverty.

Contemporary global politics is increasingly marked by conflicts. One thinks of conflicts over institutions and authorities, resources and citizenship, military force and climate change, religion and ideology. Yet prevailing cosmopolitan theories of global politics tend to abstract from conflict, through idealizing presuppositions about rights and authority, rationality and society. This conference will therefore consider the constructive roles that concepts of conflict might play in theorizing global politics. It will focus particularly on how cosmopolitan theories might be enriched and reformulated by such concepts, and thus better respond to the challenges of contemporary global conflicts.

The Political Thought Specialist Group of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom will hold its annual conference on Saturday 24th November 2012 at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The conference will be sponsored by the LSE Centre for the Study of Human Rights. The theme for this year shall be as follows:

HUMAN RIGHTS THOUGHT AND PRACTICE IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

The experiences of the Second World War and the Holocaust led to the unanimous adoption of the ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ (UDHR) by the UN General Assembly in 1948. Human rights principles had long formed part of modern constitutions all over the world, but the UDHR was the first international instrument to make a wide range of civil and political rights, as well as a number of social, economic and cultural rights part and parcel of the contemporary notion of democracy.

I recently posted an essay, “The Ironic Tragedy of Human Rights,” on the Social Science Research Network (at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1330693). As you can see from the summary below, the argument amounts to a very radical critique of human rights. This has left me wondering: have I missed something obvious? Needless to say, I’d appreciate any thoughts you may have.

Charles

SUMMARY

With the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the idea of human rights came into its own on the world stage. More than anything, the Declaration was a response to the Holocaust, to both its perpetrators and the failure of the rest of the world adequately to come to the aid of its victims. Since that year, however, we have seen many more cases of mass murder. Think of China, Bali, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and now Darfur. Of course one could always claim that such horrors would have been even more frequent if not for the Declaration. But I want to argue otherwise. For I believe that human rights have contributed to making mass murder more, rather than less, likely.

In addition to several other hats that I wear, one of these hats is co-convener of the Global Justice and Human Rights (GJHR) Group. This group is funded by the UK’s Political Studies Association (PSA).

Each year the GJHR Group is given sessions at the PSA annual conference: last year, we put on our first sessions since coming into existence a few months before. Each was very well attended and we have been awarded up to four sessions for the next annual conference.

The next PSA annual conference will take place at the Manchester Conference Centre from 7th-9th April 2009. The conference website is here.